About me
My online persona avatar - a robot kitty!
Hello!
I'm TheMysticSword, though people usually call me 'Mystic' for short. I'm an indie game developer, modder and an English to Russian translator from Russia. I go by she/her.
What I do
I work on different kinds of games and try not to restrict myself to specific genres. So far, most of my projects are solo works, with me designing the game, writing code and making art, and music & sounds being taken from online resources under suitable Creative Commons licenses.
If you are a fan of indie roguelikes and often play with mods, you may have already heard of me! The highlights of my past modding work include the Megaquest mod for Dicey Dungeons and the Dicey Wastelands mod for Nuclear Throne Together.
I also take interest in translating video games from English to Russian and vice versa. If you need your game translated, don't hesitate to contact me! I'm especially keen on helping out fellow indies!
You can check out all of my past work by visiting pages under the Portfolio section.
Skills
Languages
- Haxe
- C#
- GML
- Python
- JavaScript
- HTML
- CSS
Engines/frameworks
- HaxeFlixel
- GameMaker
- Godot
- ct.js
Tools
- Visual Studio
- Git
- Blender
- Krita
Fields
- Game Design
- Game Localisation (English⇿Russian)
In the past
I started my programming journey during my teen years, back when Discord was pretty new and making Discord bots with node.js was the coolest thing. Later, while playing through Nuclear Throne for the first time, I found out about Nuclear Throne Together, a mod for that game which allows anyone to write their own mods for it. NTT served as an introduction to creating my own video game content and systems. A lot of my NTT mod ideas were 'what if <content/mechanics from a different game>, but inside Nuclear Throne?', which taught me how to analyse other games' mechanics thoroughly, and how to make them fit inside a completely different game. I did end up deleting most of the mods though, either because they got broken by a game update and I wasn't interested in maintaining them anymore, or because I felt like they copied a game mechanic too much and were "uncreative".
At one point, I started participating in Mini Jam, a recurring 3-day-long game jam with a different theme each time. My first entry, I Like Dreams, placed 2nd! I was so excited about releasing my first game back then. Like, I actually made a game? That happened?? Isn't that crazy????
During my Mini Jam days, I also released my first big project - the Megaquest mod for Dicey Dungeons. It was, frankly, a mishmash of my random ideas that oftentimes were lacking in game balance due to my lack of experience in that field at the time. Nevertheless, Megaquest received a lot of support! Naturally, I kept working on it. But, after a couple of years, I started getting more and more ideas for other projects I wanted to create as well, and as the sole programmer on Megaquest, I unfortunately had to pause the development on the mod. I still hope that I can give the mod a proper final update at some point!
Personal interests
I enjoy singleplayer video games! My top favourites are:
- A Hat in Time (got all Death Wish stamps on 2 save files)
- Dicey Dungeons
- Nuclear Throne
- Celeste (got 11 goldens)
- Genshin Impact
- Zenless Zone Zero
Other than playing games, in my free time I usually work on my personal projects, hang out in some Discord chat, stream games on Twitch, or try drawing something in Krita.
